Thursday, August 05, 2004

An interesting book worth checking out if you're interested in geopolitics and so forth is Thomas P.M. Barnett's The Pentagon's New Map: War and Peace in the Twenty-First Century. Its both a discussion of how the US might deal with international relations as the world changes and a look at how some of what currently drives US policy came about. I don't agree with everything he says, but he's definitely got some interesting concepts going, like his division of the world into Functioning Core, that is the countries of the industrialised world and those elsewhere with similar economic setups like India and China, and the Non Integrated Gap, places that are disconnected in some way from the modern world economy. He's not a partisan of the current adminstration and has some criticisms of its behaviour which I think are valid from his perspsective. He also has a personal website dealing with his writings.